Tea Rolls
USE the same recipe as for Tea Biscuit, but after rolling out dough and cutting it, fold it over into shape of rolls. Place in pans, set to rise and bake as in recipe given above.
Four lines and no ingredients. The recipe is a shaping instruction attached to another page's dough, which is how this booklet handles a good many of its rolls.
- Start on the Tea Biscuit pageNothing here stands alone. The dough, the quantities and the rising times all come from the Tea Biscuit recipe, and “bake as in recipe given above” points back to that page rather than to this one. Read it through before mixing anything.
- Not a baking-powder biscuitThe page itself settles this: the shaped rolls are set to rise, which no quick biscuit does. Whatever the word biscuit suggests to an American cook now, the dough underneath these is yeast-raised, and reaching for baking powder produces something that cannot be rolled, cut, folded and proofed as directed.
- The fold is the whole recipeRoll, cut, then fold each round over on itself before it goes in the pan. The booklet distinguishes one roll from another by gesture far more than by formula, and this fold is close kin to the Parker House. What separates the two is which page's dough went under the cutter.
- A folded round takes longer to riseAny times carried over from the Tea Biscuit page were written for cut rounds lying flat. A folded roll is twice that thickness and will look light later than the parent recipe allows. Go by the appearance of the shaped rolls rather than by the borrowed clock.
- Keep the seam from springingButter brushed inside the fold before closing it keeps the halves separable after baking, and setting the rolls close enough to touch keeps the fold from opening in the oven. A folded roll also wants a few minutes longer in the oven than a flat biscuit of the same dough.
The booklet names its rolls for the meal they belong to rather than for what is in them: tea rolls, lunch rolls, dinner rolls, children's buns. The distinctions are social, not culinary, and in cases like this one the dough is identical and only the shaping changes. That says something about the household the book addresses, one with an afternoon tea distinct from lunch and from dinner, each occasion expected to have its own bread on the table. It says something about the publisher too. A roll named for an occasion is a roll with an occasion to be made for, and four names over one dough hands a cook four separate reasons in a week to open another cake of yeast.